Sunday, January 3, 2016

2015 turned out to be a tumultuous year in Australian Far Right politics. The Reclaim movement took off, drawing working-class crowds in the hundreds and shocking the mainstream political establishment - and the Far Left.

Quite a few people on the 'old' Australian Far Right - Australian nativists, white nationalists, neo-Nazis, neo-fascists, race realists, you name it - jumped on board, and a handful even managed to end up in prominent leadership positions within Reclaim. But, inevitably, reaction set in. Whenever a Far Right and populist movement emerges in Australia, the mainstream Australian conservative party will a) either try and infiltrate it with a view to using it as a vehicle to garner more conservative votes or b) neutralise it through dirty tricks. We've seen shady political operatives working for the conservatives - particularly in New South Wales - try both approaches. That's business as usual for Australian politics, and not only for politics in Australia: look at Russia, where Putin has jailed one half of the Russian extreme-right movement and co-opted (through bribery, or force, or both) the other half.

One unexpected consequence (although it should have been foreseen by the nationalists participating in Reclaim) was that the Zios and the civics in Reclaim decided that they didn't like the presence of the nationalists, and so worked to purge them. To some members of the 'Old Guard' of Australian nationalism, this seemed eerily reminiscent of Nick Griffin's attempt at a purge of racialists and 'Nutzis' from the British nationalist movement over ten years ago. Then Griffin claimed to be a 'moderniser' who would remove the 'dead wood' - all the anti-Semites, racialists, neo-Nazis, Mosleyites, League of Empire loyalists, conspiracy theorists and the like - hanging around British nationalism's neck like an albatross for decades. A purge by Griffin, or so the narrative ran, would show the British middle-classes, and the British political establishment itself, that British nationalism had cleaned up its act and was now ready to assume office. At the time, Griffin's thesis - that the 'Young Turks' of nationalism needed to sweep the 'Old Guard' into the dustbin of history - seemed a beguiling one; at the time, I was willing, for the sake of argument, to give Griffin the benefit of doubt. But he crashed and burned, as we all know, and went back on his words. I've become leery of 'modernisers' ever since that experience, and after 2015 - when I've been lumped in the same camp as the 'Nutzis' scorned and excoriated by Griffin - I've become even more averse.

This year shall require a Herculean effort: to boot the Zios and civics out of the Australian Far Right, to lock them out of the movement they helped create - Reclaim. This shall require a recourse to communist tactics (more later) and a twin effort: one from below, one from above. The effort from 'below' shall come from the grassroots of Australian nationalism, the effort from 'above', from those nationalists and patriots - real patriots, as opposed to 'civic' ones - who are located at the top of the Reclaim leadership.

This, in turn, necessitates a different approach from the one usually taken in nationalist and racialist politics. Which is why I have little time for snide polemics like that found in a RamZPaul video, championed by Alt Right, here.

Readers can watch the video, and read the responses at Alt Right, themselves. I have nothing to contribute to the debate, except to say that two lines seem to be emerging in the Far Right racialist movement: between those who don't have a problem with the historical German National Socialism and those who want to 'play it safe' by disavowing it. Within the context of its own (hyper racialist) philosophy, the latter camp (mostly based in America) doesn't seem to make much sense to me. Surely any white nationalist, racialist, race realist, Whitakerite, what have you, would champion Hitler?

I am, at the moment, re-reading that great political text, Mein Kampf. In an old philosophy textbook, I once saw a reference to Nietzsche as the 'King of the One-Liners'. I don't know if that is true of Nietzsche (it probably is), but certainly, in the field of politics, it is of Hitler. Consider the following, taken from volume II, chapter II, 'The State':

But it is almost inconceivable how such a mistake could be made as to think that a Ni**r or a Chinaman will become a German because he has learned the German language and is willing to speak German for the future and even to cast his vote for a German political party.

Only with the extermination of the last race that possesses the gift of cultural creativeness, and indeed only if all the individuals of that race had also disappeared, would the earth definitely be turned into a desert.

On the other hand, a State may be called bad if, in spite of the existence of a high cultural level, it dooms to destruction the bearers of that culture by breaking up their racial uniformity.

Therefore, the worth of a State can be determined only by asking how far it actually succeeds in promoting the well-being of a definite race and not by the role which it plays in the world at large.

The protest which is put forward in the name of humanity does not fit the mouth of a generation that makes it possible for the most depraved degenerates to propagate themselves, thereby imposing unspeakable suffering on their own products and their contemporaries, while, on the other hand, contraceptives are permitted and sold in every drug store and even by street hawkers, so that babies should not be born even among the healthiest of our people.

They [the Christians] talk about the Spirit, but they allow man, as the embodiment of the Spirit, to degenerate to the proletarian level.

It will be the task of the People's State to make the race the centre of the life of the community.

[The People's State] must proclaim the truth that the child is the most valuable possession a people can have.

Provision must be made for the normally fertile woman so that she will not be restricted in child-bearing through the financial and economic system operating in a political regime that looks upon the blessing of having children as a curse to their parents.

Loyalty, self-sacrifice, and discretion are virtues which a great nation must possess.

Either the German youth will one day create a new State founded on the racial idea or they will be the last witnesses of the complete breakdown and death of the bourgeois world.

The man who demands from Fate a guarantee of his success deliberately denies the significance of an heroic act.

[On modern education] And, though it may seem incredible, many a boy is told that the gallows tree is waiting for him, because he has shown certain traits which might be of inestimable value in the nation as a whole.

[On social justice ] One can be proud of one's people only if there is no class left of which one need to be ashamed.

[The individual's] real purpose in life is to better himself and raise himself to a higher level as a human being, but this he can only do in and through the community, whose cultural life he shares.

Man should take care not to have too low an estimate of the power of an ideal.

I don't see how anyone who posts on Alt Right, American Renaissance, Counter-Currents, Steve Sailer and the rest can really object to the above - especially the quotations on race. They should embrace Mein Kampf as a great racialist text, on a par with the writings of Stoddard and Grant. But they don't - because they are afraid. Fair enough. But they seem, in the words of Keats, 'Half in love with easeful death'. If you look at the RamZPaul article, you find, on the left-hand column, a picture of 'radio priest' Father Coughlin, noted Depression-era American fascist (under the heading 'Alt Right Podcasts'), a mocked-up photo of Hitler with his arm on Afro-American athlete Jesse Owens' shoulder... One angry respondent to RamZPaul made the point that RamZPaul (and, by extension, Alt Right) depends on the white nationalist / neo-Nazi / racialist / '1488' brigade for their bread and butter, and yet he spits in their faces. Which raises a valid point: how often do you see communists festoon their sites with pictures of Mao, Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Marx and Engels - in an 'edgy' and 'ironic' way - and at the same time write articles lampooning and denouncing them?

The truth of the matter is that the Nowickis and RamZPauls and the rest of the Americans belong in the nationalist, racialist, 'neo-Nazi', 'neofascist' camp (or whatever you want to call it) but don't want to get their hands dirty and engage in actual politics - not like we Australians are presently doing.

II.

The chapter, 'The State', probably stands as the most idealistic in Mein Kampf, and Hitler seems to be an ultra-idealist - I once complained to a nationalist friend that Mein Kampf was all theory, no politics. Unlike Hitler, I lack the capacity to make stirring speeches which appeal to the deepest longings of the human heart; in response to any speech of the Hitler type, I'll ask - as a practical man - 'OK, chief, I agree with you, so - how do we put your speech into action?'. I see a Hitler piece of writing as a problem needing to be fixed, and an especially difficult problem given that Mein Kampf seems to fill the Zios - not just the Jews, but the Zios - with an irrational, psychotic fury; they don't see the idealism, or the good, in Mein Kampf - quite the opposite. They lack all objectivity, they can't see the good, and bad, sides of the doctrine, and what's more, they loathe you if they discover that you have good things to say about it and become absolutely determined to destroy you.

Most people view politics through the prism of elections, votes, parties, polls. I view it differently. Imagine politics as an endless archipelago, with the followers of each political tendency or movement clustered on a different island. Each clump of people represents only a small percentage of the population; you can't say that large percentages are neoliberal, or Trotskyite communist, or Catholic conservative, or whatever. In politics, you will be, as an activist, working with small groups most of the time: instead of hundreds of thousands, or millions of voters, you'll be dealing with groups the size of squads, platoons, sections, companies - each occupying their own little island. The communist groups - particularly the Trotskyite ones, which multiply like vermin - in Britain consist of only small numbers of people relative to the population and have never won a general election. But look at the damage they have wrought to Britain over the past four or so decades - it's incalculable.

For me, politics - especially after 2015 - has become a war, a war for total control, and one waged between small units. By 'total control', I mean total and absolute control over the actions of a group on another island and the flow of information from one island to another. Some may call that impulse of mine totalitarian, and so be it: I've become a totalitarian.

To give a concrete example of the above, let's take the Reclaim rallies. Many of the speakers there extol the virtues of courage, honour, loyalty, patriotism, fellow-feeling and they sound off against Islam - all of that is OK by me. But some, subtly, will work in Zio and civic themes into their speeches: they will praise multiculturalism, multiracialism, diversity, non-immigration (so long as the immigrants aren't Muslim); they will praise Churchill and denounce Hitler, German National Socialism, and the 'racists' and 'Nazis' in the audience (whoever they may be). I was told that, at a Reclaim rally in Perth, eight flags were festooned on the stage - six of them Israeli, two Australian. (I think we see the agenda of what Yockey calls the 'Culture Distorter' here). But if I ran the rallies, I'd make sure that there would be no Israeli flags. And I'd turn off the microphone the minute any of the Reclaim speakers started inserting, at random, references to Hitler, WWII, the National Socialists; if they started engaging in 'virtue signalling' by praising multi-culti and diversity. But then, I'd warn the speakers beforehand not to spout any of the Culture Distorter's drivel, and probably wouldn't have invited them to speak in the first place if I had identified them as civics and Zios. Politics becomes a battle of opinions, and we see, from Reclaim, that the Culture Distorters are, very cleverly and subtly, doing their best to divert the rage felt by the masses against Islam in Australia to safe channels: support for Israel, votes for the Liberal Party, support for a Dresden-style bombing of 'ISIS-held' areas of Syria and Iraq... The Culture Distorters mustn't be allowed to do this. I don't expect to hear extracts from Mein Kampf and Yockey's Imperium read at these rallies, but at the same time, I expect displays of Zionist fervour, gratuitous comparisons of the Koran to Mein Kampf, coddling of negroes and other non-whites in the audience to be omitted. I think that these demands are reasonable and simple enough for the rally organisers to meet, but I know that they won't be met - not until I and my tendency (the racial nationalist or nativist tendency or whatever you want to call it) have become, in effect, the sole rally organisers. We have to run everything, and when we give an order, we will see that it's obeyed. If that makes us 'fascist', 'totalitarian', then so be it.

An outside observer may ask: 'Why the devil do you care about what is said and not said at a rally?'. I'll answer the question this way. The old cliché in politics goes, 'If you can't run your party, you can't run the country'. Like it or not, the vast number of nationalist and 'patriot' groups constitute my party. And if I, as a nativist or racialist or whatever, can't get the most basic strictures enforced, then how can I ever expect to run the country?

Selznick wrote, in his Organizational Weapon (1953) that the NSDAP and the communist parties of Europe resembled a 'state within a state'. Now, one must ask: did those organisations permit anarchy in their ranks? Did they tolerate anarchy within their 'states within a state'? Or did every publication, every rally, every march, every demonstration, every radio broadcast not reflect one view, one line - the line held by those at the top...

III.

So how are the political battles of this year to be fought? By using certain communist tactics which seem to have been borrowed from the NSDAP (but it's hard to tell what came first - the chicken or the egg). To explain this, let's take a look at the British Labour Party.

I wrote in a recent article that communists had succeeded in taking over that venerable British institution, the Labour Party. The Party had been falling into the communist orbit for some time - and it's hard to tell, from looking at its present array of MPs, who's a communist and who's not - and the mass infiltration of communist members, and subsequent election of Jeremy Corbyn, an unreconstructed eighties-era Trotskyite, represented the death blow to Labour's social democratic wing. But it looks like the takeover wasn't quite complete: pockets of resistance remain. Now the Corbynista Marxists in the party have set themselves the task of eradicating them...

As to how they intend to do this, the Corbynistas appear to be taking a leaf out of the old communist playbook - one in particular by Jan Kozak, And Not a Shot is Fired (1999). In the late 1940s, communists in Eastern Europe managed to take over states which were ostensibly liberal democratic in what was a series of more or less bloodless coups. Kozak, a Czech communist, wrote two lengthy papers outlining the methods used and giving an ideological justification for them. These papers were collected and published in 1999 by a conservative American publisher who sought to warn the post-cold war world of the dangers of a resurgent communism. Roman Saskiw has done a short review on YouTube of the book here.

To explain Kozak in a nutshell. In Eastern Europe after the war, the communist parties manage to a) get elected as part of a coalition government (which included many non-communist parties) and b) get control of two vital government departments - the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Information. Flows of information through the media were cut off, or regulated, by the communist-controlled Ministry of Information, while anyone belonging to one of the non-communist parties who take a stand against the communists was hounded, harassed, and even arrested, by the Ministry of Interior's secret police. Because of this pressure, politicians opposed to communism were often expelled from their parties and replaced with quiescent, pro-communist fellow travellers. Eventually the parliamentary majority held by the non-communist parties was whittled down. Meanwhile, the communists in the cabinet managed to get a few communist laws passed, nationalising key sectors of industry as well as churches and schools, introducing land reform, raising taxes on the wealthy... These procedures - or perhaps we should call them tactics, as we see that the entire thing resembles a war - made up what Kozak calls 'pressure from above'. 'From below', the communists organised a massive extra-parliamentary opposition, composed of trade unions, armed worker's militias, 'action committees', student groups and the like. These agitated in the usual communist manner and availed themselves of the usual protest methods - grievance meetings, resolutions, delegations to politicians' offices, demonstrations, strikes. During the assumption of power by the Czechoslovak communists in 1948, the 'action committees' even occupied factories and government offices. All of this was stage-managed by the communists; you could say the extra-parliamentary opposition was mobilised and deployed like a military unit on the battlefield.

Kozak speaks of this as a 'two pincer' strategy: one from below, the other from above, bear down and crush liberal democracy like an eggshell. The Corbynistas are applying this method in miniature, but to the Labour Party, not to the British State itself. Corbyn can, as leader of the party, apply pressure from above to the 'old' Labour holdouts and to insubordinate MPs. 'Grass-roots' organisations such as Momentum - a communist front group - apply the pressure from below.

Unfortunately for the Corbynistas, a secret paper (called 'Taking Control of the Party') by the director of Momentum, Jon Lansman, (ex-member of the notorious Trotskyite outfit the Militant Tendency) was leaked to the media. We find this account of 'Taking Control of the Party' in the lurid Daily Mail:

The document calls for control of:

Selections of all candidates for parliamentary seats and even appointments of all senior staff in the party. The NEC [National Executive Committee] currently has nothing to do with recruitment.

Making policy - all Labour policies would have to be put to members for debate before they can be adopted, which would give Mr Corbyn a chance to change party policy on Trident. But it would provoke a major row with his shadow cabinet and unions, who largely support renewal of the nuclear deterrent.

Media strategy: a 'communications committee' would be set up to 'oversee the party's media and campaign messages' – implying it would vet all the press releases of shadow ministers. It would also develop a programme of unspecified 'political education activity'.

Boundaries: most chilling for moderate MPs, it lays out how Mr Corbyn's supporters could get involved of the review of constituency boundaries in 2018, in which some MPs will lose their seats. If the hard Left seized control of this independent process they could ensure moderate MPs are ousted in favour of Mr Corbyn's supporters.

The Mail goes on to say:

Mr Corbyn has the support of only a small number of Labour MPs but was elected with an enormous mandate from party members and assorted left-wingers who signed up to vote for £3.

His supporters have been trying to tighten their grip on the party's machinery. They already have a majority on the NEC - the main administrative body which has representatives from local parties, unions, MPs and affiliated groups - after installing members from hard Left unions and Corbyn-supporting MPs.

Now this is real politics. One can't imagine a RamZPaul or a Greg Johnson or Andy Nowicki or Jared Taylor engaging in it.

IV.

One has to ask - when looking at the history of Eastern Europe in the late 1940s - why the non-communists allowed the communists to get away with what they did - why they didn't put up more resistance. The answer lies in the prestige and power of the socialist idea. This idea had few detractors in intellectual circles: you didn't find many propagandists and agitators for neoliberalism and free-market capitalism in those days. Besides which, the masses really didn't understand that communist program - nationalisation, collectivisation, five-year plans, forced requisitioning of produce from peasants - entails misery. Communism resembles a confidence trick which can only be pulled off once. Having fallen for it once, the peoples of Russia and China - after 1990 - aren't going to fall for it again. Today's Far Left knows this fact and feels depressed by it.

But, at the time of the East European coups - the late 1940s - the Marxist ideal stood high. The communists spent a lot of time attacking their social democrat rivals for falling short of that ideal. They intended to 'expose' and 'unmask' the social democrats before the 'masses': they informed the 'masses' that the social democrats weren't the real deal, that the social democrats had sold out to capitalism and the bourgeoisie and were diverting the working peoples from true socialism. This strategy proved to be quite effective. The communists would ask, 'If you want socialism, why settle for half-measures? Why not go the whole hog? Doesn't social democracy represent a step down?'; the social democrats were unable to answer these questions adequately. On a subconscious level, they felt guilt, and it could be said that the communists were able to guilt-trip the majority of them into submission.

This 'unmasking' strategy paid dividends for the communists at a time when the prestige of socialism - and Marxism - was soaring; it can pay dividends for we nationalists today. We know from the history of the Weimar Republic that the NSDAP's rivals on the Far Right - Hugenberg's German National People's Party (DNVP) - promulgated a German nationalism that agreed with German National Socialism on many points, and from a superficial perspective, the ideology of the two parties look identical. But Hugenberg was selling soft soap, just like the social democrats, and in the end the 'moderate' Hugenberg was defeated by the 'extremist' Hitler. A lesson there can be found for us. No doubt, in those election campaigns in the early 1930s, National Socialist agitators asked the question, 'Why vote for a watered-down German nationalism when you can have the real thing?'. The question doesn't have a real answer. If the Hugenbergites made the rejoinder, 'Hitler is too extreme, Hugenberg is a moderate, a sensible man, a man who'll get things done', they'd have put themselves on the back foot and appeared defensive.

The applications of this strategy to the present dispute between Reclaim and the nationalists seem obvious. The nationalists can make the argument: 'Why cut only Muslim immigration? Why not all immigration? After all, White Australia was a national institution which came to an end only fifty years ago. What real "patriot" would be against White Australia? Or does the so-called "patriot" movement support the state-sanctioned multi-cultism of Whitlam and Fraser... Are we rolling that multi-cultism back? At all? You don't sound like a "patriot" to me'. Many nationalists dwell in the Reclaim ranks, some of them in leadership positions. They can be made to feel ashamed - guilt-tripped - for supporting a movement which a) equates the Koran with Mein Kampf, b) supports non-white immigration and c) supports Israel.

These nationalists can serve as the men on the inside; like Corbyn's communists within the Labour Party, they can apply pressure 'from above' and carry out the Eastern European communist program of, in Selznick's words, 'purges, indoctrination and intimidation'. In turn, 'spontaneous', 'grass-roots' mass organisations can pressure Reclaim 'from below'.

Really, though, everything turns on the nationalists within Reclaim. Do they have the requisite strength to carry out the task of de-Zionifying and de-civicising the Reclaim movement from within? Can they demonstrate the toughness and political acumen of the Corbynistas or the East European communists? Or the NSDAP, for that matter? We need political operators who are tough men, men who'll eat glass for breakfast. Can we find them?

On the answer to that, the future of nationalism in Australia depends.